Books

Milestones when your child reaches age 6: Her first baby tooth comes out. He wobbles through his first bike ride. She can count to 100, and his vocabulary tops 5,000 words. Now there's a new rite of passage – that first Facebook chat.

The new Chris Ware book has sat beside my desk for weeks. It's been tough to miss. It's about a foot-and-a-half tall with a canary-yellow spine, and the cover image is signature Ware: Comic book hieroglyphics of domestic ennui, linked by thin schematic lines, flow charts of word balloons and worried portraits of the Oak Park, Ill., genius himself. It's like the blueprints for a bomb that leaves you melancholy. Even if I wanted to avoid it, I couldn't: My desk is only slightly larger than the book, yet "Monograph" ($60, Rizzoli), a survey of an artist who turns only 50 this month, is perfectly outsized, correctly singular.

Pioneering feminist Anna J. Cooper once wrote, "black people have to stop imitating white people and white culture." She went on to say that black Americans in 1893 had to find their own voice, the roots of which are buried in the literature, mythology and folktales and music created by their enslaved ancestors. A century later, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. read her essay, published in "The Southern Workman," he found her words exceptional.

It should be no surprise that when it comes to interviews, Tom Hanks prefers to type. His new book, "Uncommon Type: Stories," is a collection of stories in which a typewriter makes a cameo in every one.

Here are the best-sellers for the week that ended Sunday, Dec. 3, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by NPD BookScan (c) 2017 NPD Group.

800-CEO-READ, a leading direct supplier of book-based resources compiles a monthly list of best-selling business books based on purchases by its corporate customers nationwide. Here are the best sellers for November 2017, plus descriptions of the Top 10.

It was an afterthought; a 99-cent pocket Constitution that Khizr Khan bought in bulk, so he could give one to each of the Army ROTC cadets from the University of Virginia who came to his home to honor his son, a former cadet like them who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

I've been asked in multiple interviews what my relationship to Agatha Christie was before writing the adaptation of "Murder on the Orient Express," and I've evaded the question or outright lied every time. The reason is: Because I hated her.